Best of the Program with Dr. James Lindsay | 10/15/18

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Hey, welcome to Monday.

It is the podcast.

We are just a couple weeks away from the beginning of the big tour going across the country.

Stopping in your city.

Go to Glennbeck.com/slash tour and you can see where we're going.

And you can...

I mean, I don't know.

To me, the Elizabeth Warren discovery of her Native American

heritage might give us some idea.

What are the odds

Well, they're saying she's either 132nd Native American or 1 1024th Native American.

However, they don't actually they didn't actually test Native American DNA to figure that out.

Well, because they don't have any DNA.

You know, a lot of the Native American tribes, their leaders have said, don't participate in any, so we don't actually have any Native American DNA.

So read the reports.

First of all, the the supposedly Native American

relative identified themselves as white.

Secondly,

they only tested Peruvian, Mexican, and Colombian DNA to figure out whether she was Native American.

So she might be Mexican.

She might be Mexican, Peruvian, or Colombian.

That's what they actually found.

They're just saying, well, some of those people may have also been the same people who settled in North America.

I think what we're saying here is by the time you get to the theater, we're going to have lots of jokes.

Yes.

We're going to have lots of jokes.

So grab your tickets.

You can find them online at glenbeck.com/slash tour.

Going to be headed out right before the election and right after the election.

Lots and lots of laughs.

Make sure you join us, glenbeck.com slash tour.

Okay, today's podcast.

I think the interesting one was James Lindsay today.

We had Dr.

James Lindsay on, and he's the guy who oversaw the,

would you call them hoaxes for the scientific reviews?

I think that's fair.

He wrote fake papers to get them submitted into real top-level journals, and he goes through all the,

you know, how the scientific community, and in particular gender studies and feminist studies, were, you know, faked into,

you know, publishing nonsense.

Right.

And it's not just nonsense.

I mean, some of it is.

Dog Park Grape was nonsense.

But some of it is actually truly terrifying.

And I talked to him about that terrifying moment when you realize, oh my gosh, they're publishing this.

And then, oh my gosh, they're publishing this and what it means in academia and in our culture.

He's quite clear on that.

Let me go over the election numbers as they look right now.

Also, you started the show with

a message and you've posted this as well at Glenbeck.com.

You can read it at Glenbeck.com.

But a message kind of stepping back and looking at the world a little bit more than day-to-day and more like 50,000-foot view.

Yeah,

as a doctor, which you know I am.

Yes.

We've been diagnosed as sick, and that's right.

But I don't think we have the disease the doctors are telling us we have.

And what we need to do to get well again, it's the podcast for Monday.

You're listening to the best of the Blenbeck program.

It's Monday, October 15th.

You know the saying, may you live in interesting times?

They always say, oh, that's a Chinese curse.

It's really not.

No, it's not.

May you live in interesting times is not a Chinese curse.

In fact, the first place that we can really find it being said is in the Yorkshire Post that's in England in 1936.

A guy stood up in Parliament.

His name was Sir Austin Chamberlain.

And

he was meeting with unionists, and he spoke of the grave injury to collective security by Germany's violation of the treaties.

So he said,

look,

not so long ago, I spent some years of service in China, and there was this old Chinese fellow who told me of a curse.

May you live in interesting times.

And there is no doubt that this curse has fallen upon us.

So it's not Chinese.

It's this guy.

It's the only one.

It's the only place we can really find this.

But I've always liked that because I don't think it's a curse.

It's just a saying.

And you decide if it's a blessing or a curse.

I personally think it's a blessing.

My dad taught me when I was really young.

That no matter what happens to you,

there is no bad.

Now, he taught me this when I was really young, but

it took me hitting rock bottom, alcoholism, divorce, everything else, my life completely falling apart before I really learned that.

It took a dark chapter in my life that taught me there is nothing that life can hand you that is in itself bad.

It just depends on what you do with it.

Is this going to change you in destructive ways?

Is it going to make you angry?

Are you going to be filled with bitterness and despair?

Are you going to be looking for vengeance, blame?

Or will you allow whatever calamity has come your way to strengthen you

through

enlightenment, through correction, new understandings, humility?

It's up to you.

So, living in interesting times, I think that's a blessing.

And we're going to learn this one way or another.

We can either learn this the easy way, like with my dad telling me, or we're going to learn it the hard way, like I actually had to take at the end and learn through just total collapse.

But one way or another, humility will reign again because we have an unbelievable lack of humility.

In DC, in Hollywood, I have a story today to tell you about Michael Bouble, who's now quitting the music industry.

He says he's tired of the celebrity nonsense.

Everybody on the left and the right,

we all have an ego problem.

We're utterly convinced that our side is absolutely right.

And if you violate that,

If you violate one part of that, you're a traitor.

You're a traitor to the race, the party, the cause, whatever.

They are wrong and we remain right.

Now, there are real true right and wrongs.

There is truth.

But I don't think any of us are really looking for it.

At least a large section isn't looking for it.

We are indeed living in interesting times.

But is our crisis, is our problem a them problem?

Because that's what the world is trying to sell us.

I personally think it's an us problem.

All of us, both sides, all of us.

And maybe we don't see it because we're so busy staging and filtering and enhancing the colors on our Facebook or Instagram pictures that we can really no longer recognize what is true even about our own lives.

Because everything that we print and post, most of it is a lie, one way or another, subtle or bold, it's a lie.

And why is that?

Because we've been marketed to ever since we were born, all of us.

If you were born after 1950, you were marketed to your whole life.

Especially now, it's just getting worse and worse and worse and worse.

You are not complete unless you wear, consume, you own, you vacation at, or you don't buy product A or B.

You're not complete.

You're not good enough.

You're not complete.

You have to have this product.

But now we're being told that you can't even be part of the great new society unless we believe and champion product, politician, or party A, B, or C.

Opinions now are products as well that you must embrace and wear.

Somebody else's, not yours.

And now we're in the final stages where we ourselves are products.

Companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon and YouTube.

We're not a customer.

We're now the commodity.

We're the thing they're selling.

Oh, you want this group of people that want to buy these things?

Here they are.

If you can't fill in the line,

I am blank.

If you can't fill that in with an actual

word and be it complete, happy, satisfied, excited,

or I am worthless.

If you don't fill it in yourself,

somebody else will.

And marketers are trying to fill that in for you.

You buy this product, and you can say, I am cool, or I am in style, I am rich, I am am smart.

You buy Democrat and you can say I am compassionate.

You buy the Democratic label.

I am smarter than others.

I am science-minded.

And it doesn't even matter if you really are.

It doesn't matter if you've ever given a dime or given any time to anything.

Just by buying this label, you are compassionate.

It's the label that everybody needs.

Now, If you want to buy Republican, well, then you get to be patriotic.

I am patriotic.

I support our troops.

I support family values.

It doesn't matter if you're whoring it every night.

If you're by the Republican label, you can say that.

Buy the Christian label, and you can do whatever you want.

You just use religion to excuse you or others in their behavior.

Buy the label progressive.

Oh my gosh, I am science-minded, even though you deny basic biology.

Labels like courage.

He has courage.

That has a price tag now.

But don't buy now because the price of courage is going lower and lower for a while.

For a while, this this was a time-revered label.

You actually had to earn this, but now it can be yours simply by saying things out loud in a room full of people who all agree with you and will cheer and clap when you finally say what they're thinking.

That's courage.

Oh, they have such courage.

Labels and words are experiencing a fire sale and it seems

everything must go now.

But once that fire sale is over,

something else happens.

And what comes next

forces people to earn their labels.

And that's the world we're about to enter.

And I actually think it's a blessing, not a curse.

The best of the Glenbeck program.

Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship.

Part 1 Introduction.

Something has gone wrong in the university, especially in certain fields within the humanities.

Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant within these fields.

And there are scholars increasingly that bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview.

So, Dr.

James Lindsay, along with a couple of other friends, decided, you know,

let's find out what this is all about and let's see what the lines are.

And they learned an awful lot.

They learned something quite valuable, that you just can't get away with anything.

You have to fall into

a set pattern, really.

Dr.

James Lindsay is joining us now.

He is a thinker.

He's not a philosopher, but he is a thinker, which I like.

A doctorate in math, background in physics.

James, how are are you, sir?

I'm good, Glenn.

How are you?

I'm good.

So

tell us what you were trying to do.

What were you trying to prove?

Well, we were looking into these fields to find out whether or not their scholarship has gotten so kind of ideologically biased that if we put forth

really absurd arguments,

that they might be willing to publish those so long as they fell in line with the political views that they seem to be forwarding in place of scholarship.

So at first you didn't you didn't really understand the political view part, right?

Because the first few

studies that you've you submitted, you got back.

They were rejected.

Yeah, well, it's not quite that, actually.

I think we understood the political view, but we didn't understand the need for scholarship.

We started this project out, and as you said, we got the first several papers back rejected.

We started in August by Thanksgiving.

It was literally Thanksgiving, the day of we really realized we were in trouble.

We weren't getting anywhere with trying to hoax them.

The problem wasn't that we didn't understand the politics so much, although there's still a lot to learn there.

And there was for us too.

It's very complicated.

They call it a matrix of domination that you have to understand.

But it was more that we actually were not trying to work their scholarship in.

So there are two things that are needed to get these papers in.

One is that you actually have to understand what they call scholarship.

You have to do it according to their rules.

You have to understand the concepts you're working with and present them knowledgeably.

And then you also have to navigate this kind of matrix of offense-based rules that stand in place of what stand in place of the academic rigor you would expect in a

more serious field.

One of the things i thought was really interesting and and i i apologize for i think misunderstanding this initially because the coverage gave me the impression that what you were outing here was these sort of pay-for-play journals where you could get anything published as long as you pay and they'll print anything but this is um i think a much much much more thorough process and b much scarier because these were not these like you know crappy internet things that you could pay a hundred dollars to get your thing your you know nonsense published.

These were top-end journals.

Can I go through how you made the decision to go that direction?

Yeah, actually, you know, a little over a year ago, about a year and a half ago, I heard you on your program reading out from the paper I wrote previously with Peter Bogoshin, the conceptual penis as a social construct.

And that ended up going to one of these pay

pay to publish open access journals that has apparently fairly low or very low review standards.

And so it didn't prove what we wanted to prove or didn't even really offer good evidence for what we're looking at.

But it was fun.

We learned our

functional.

Yeah, penises don't exist, but they cause all of our problems anyway.

Right.

Basically

that.

But yeah, so we learned our lesson.

We took the criticisms we got from that to heart.

It was fun, but it didn't work.

People criticized us, I think, fairly, pointed out where we were weak by using these journals.

And instead, we committed to a few things going into this new project.

One is that we would not use pay-to-publish journals in any sense.

Secondly, and by the way, they don't charge like $100.

They charge like a couple thousand.

It's really kind of a financial racket going on there.

It's its own big problem, and I hope people continue to address it.

Secondly, we decided that we would use the highest ranked journals within the disciplines that we were examining that we could get into.

So we would start at the best journal we could find for what we were doing and then work our way down.

If that one didn't take it, we'd go to the next one.

And then thirdly, we committed to being transparent about our results no matter what happened.

So if our if we had gone crash and burn complete failure, then

That would have would have been what we reported.

I don't think it would have gotten much attention, but we would have come out and admitted that we were wrong.

But it that's not what happened.

And

early on in the process, not just to keep us honest, because I think we would have kept our promise, but early on in the process, we ended up in contact with a documentary filmmaker who was interested in this stuff already.

So he's been recording us for a year.

His name's Mike Nana.

And since he's been recording us, I mean, clearly, whatever happened is going to come out.

So there it is.

Okay, so before we take a break and get into what you actually got published,

tell me about the work behind it.

This took a year to do.

What kind of time

are you looking at?

Well, the easiest kind of thing to look at with this is I had exactly five social outings between Thanksgiving and when

the project came out into the public.

I took maybe that many days off, including weekends.

I work probably 80 to 90 hours a week, almost every week.

My two collaborators worked also very, very hard.

Peter put in at least a full-time job.

Helen did most of the same.

And I know you talked to Helen the other day.

Yeah.

So this was an immense amount of work.

It required learning these fields very quickly, writing academic papers.

A typical academic will publish a couple a year, maybe, if they're working hard.

And we wrote 20.

Holy cow.

Yeah, it's a lot of work.

It was an insane amount of work.

And these are all fields we have no expertise in.

Helen has a little bit of background in some of this, but this was primarily having to learn this material on the fly with no education, with no teachers instructing us.

Our only feedback was how our papers fared in the peer review process, and then reading what was out there to try to emulate it.

And so

what does having something published in one of these magazines mean?

What does that mean to

the author and to the educational community?

So for the author, it is the absolute pinnacle of what an academic is trying to do in the research side of their career is to get papers published in well-established journals.

For example, Hypatia is one of the journals we got a paper in, and Hypatia is the feminist philosophy journal with probably the highest standing.

So it would carry a lot of weight looking at the academic community that that scholar is embedded in.

So they could take that to their university and say, hey, I got this many papers published.

If people are being considered for tenure, there's a research component to that.

Depends on how the school wants to do their tenuring process.

But typically, seven papers spanning seven to 10 years is considered the basic research requirement to be qualified for tenure.

Our papers spanned...

The ones we wrote spanned 15 sub-disciplines of thought.

The ones that got accepted spanned seven.

And

so we've got big journals.

We've got seven disciplines that papers got into.

We probably would have had more had we not been cut short.

You had 12 in the pipeline that looked like they would be published.

And then this came out.

And so you pulled those, but you might have had as many as 12.

I think, honestly, we had 14 that weren't dead yet.

And I can say with some confidence that I think 12 would have gotten in and possibly, possibly 13.

So I would guess with pretty good confidence that somewhere between 11 and 13 would have gotten in in the end had we not gotten pulled.

Okay, so when we come back, we'll go into, and remember,

we're on public airwaves.

So

we'll be as careful as we can to discuss what was in each of these papers

and

where they got a little gold star for.

These now published studies are just tremendous.

I mean, I don't know if you guys had beers before you came up with this or how you guys came up with these, but they're fantastic.

Let's go through some of them one by one.

Let's start with the first one, Dog Park.

The thesis is dog parks are rape-condoning spaces.

Tell me about it.

Well, it's kind of funny, actually.

I'll tell you a story.

When I went to, we all got together to have this come public as best we could.

So I went to Portland.

We all went to Portland, Oregon to

get ready for this project to come out to the public.

And we went to the dog park on the first day I got there.

Almost right, I got off the plane.

I took an Uber.

Next thing you know, I'm walking Peter's dogs up to the dog park with our filmmaker.

And we get to the dog park, and there's this just dog there that's living out the paper.

It was crazy.

This dog was fighting the other dogs, pinning them down, humping them left, right, and center.

The owner comes over,

swings the ball thrower at the dog gently.

I'll point out he wasn't being abusive, and then says, Stop humping.

And then we get to, I lean over to the filmmaker and kind of mutter, I guess, a little too loudly, like maybe we should start interrogating people about their sexuality, given what's going down here.

And then this lady yells out to me, oh no, no, it's okay, she's the girl dog.

And I was like, oh man, this paper's happening for real.

So, so, what is what is the thesis?

So, the thesis was, well, the original idea behind the thesis was that we should write a feminist paper arguing that we should train men the way that we train dogs to prevent rape culture.

And so

I thought that up today, thought it was pretty funny when I was brainstorming ideas for papers, threw it to Peter.

Peter takes his dogs to the dog park every day.

said, let's work in some of the stuff from the dog park.

And as we started working in just, you know, absolutely absurd ideas from what might be considered the most ridiculous dog park in the world uh

the paper grew into that and so we made it about so-called queer performativity in human reactions at the dog park and then ended up concluding things like that

we we should be able to leash men like we leash dogs to prevent rape except it's not politically feasible And

it would be great if we could put shock collars on men, but but that's not okay either.

So we have to shock them out of hitting on women by screaming at them to scare them and get them to desist from their behavior.

The thesis of the paper was, though, that humans

reacted differently to gay dog humping as opposed to straight dog humping.

And men were far worse about this than women.

And then we concluded that this is indicative of rape culture, and we called the dog park rape condoning space, which we then logged into nightclubs we said rape nightclubs are also rape condoning spaces with no evidence for that whatsoever we just said it

um

so it was pretty out there um that one was was really out there i think it's i don't know maybe the one about the the feminist spiritual spirituality meetings and poetry is a little more out there but it's probably close to the most well let's let's finish the dog park this one was accepted and reviewed uh some of the reviews, this is a wonderful paper, incredibly innovative, rich in analysis, extremely well written and organized.

Yada, yada.

I believe this intellectually and empirically exciting paper must be published.

And congratulate the author on the research done and in the writer.

And in the writer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was one of the most disturbing parts of this, I feel like, because again, it wasn't like these journals looked at this and didn't really go through it and kind of just it it made its way through the process.

There are very specific comments from dozens of reviewers

who are doing peer review and saying specific things that you wrote that are completely ridiculous are amazing new accomplishments in the field.

I mean, that had to be, while funny and it proved your point, it had to be really disturbing as well.

Oh, yeah, that's by far what we consider to be the most important evidence that we gathered in the process of this project.

That the papers got published or that they got awards in some cases, or one case, and all of this, it's fine.

It says a lot and it's disturbing.

But the reviewers' comments show that these

peer reviewers, which worked out between two and four or five per paper, so we ended up with something like 45 or 50 total sets of comments.

They really did engage with what we did.

They really looked at it.

They

said our analysis was good when our analysis was terrible.

They didn't raise an eyebrow about the data we gathered.

The idea that

the dog park paper contains a bit of completely irrelevant evidence about where dogs go to the bathroom in unauthorized ways, as we worded it.

And that's completely irrelevant to the paper, but nobody raised an eyebrow about how ridiculous that is.

They were concerned, however, that we indicate that we're humans, not dogs, so that we can be sure that we don't claim that when a dog does a hump humping of another dog, whether or not the dog that got humped wanted it or not, because how could we know that as being humans, not dogs?

And they were really concerned, as I hope everybody's seen in our little video we put out to announce the project.

They're really concerned with the fact that we respect the dogs' privacy in the process of inspecting their genitals.

And

we're doubting our data.

What specifically were they concerned about?

I mean, the privacy of the dog.

What?

I mean,

you got me, man.

That it was done in the privacy of a veterinary office?

I don't.

Okay.

Let's see.

You did fat bodybuilding, which quickly is what?

That's the idea that what needs to be added to the professional sport of bodybuilding is a category in which fat is displayed politically so that fat is just considered another tissue that's equal with muscle.

And to say that that's not true is to be mean to fat people, fat phobic, as they call it.

Incredible.

And that was accepted?

Yeah, that was accepted.

That was a

pretty exciting acceptance.

Especially because we actually had a real scholar who let us use his identity, who wrote that, who we claimed wrote that paper.

And he actually is a professional bodybuilder, uh mr northern hemisphere 1978 or something i mean this guy's 70 years old and just stacked and the picture in my mind of this guy being the author of this paper for fat bodybuilding was just kind of hilarious

because that was another thing too a lot of these papers you had uh completely fake organizations you had completely fake scholars coming from colleges that i think didn't exist in some cases i mean if some of this would have been easily disproved by basic checking would it would it wouldn't it have?

I think so.

I mean, there's kind of a, this is a tricky point.

And I don't want to get too far into the weeds here, but honestly, scholarship should stand or fall on its merit, not on who did it.

And so a lot of people are making that point.

And we deliberately chose names that would be hard to find in a Google search.

In specific, we chose very common names on purpose.

I actually used

I rolled dice to pick off of a list of the most common names for certain years.

We're talking to Dr.

James Lindsay, author of Life in Light of Death.

He is, you can follow him at

Conceptual James

on Twitter.

He is one of the, if not the mastermind behind

the

papers

of record that were being written

for feminist studies and queer studies and were published in some of the the leading journals

and critiqued, but

not really critiqued in a way that most people would.

I'm just quickly go through some of them

going in through the back door, which is not something we're going to discuss here.

That's really great.

Rubbing one out,

the violence of objectification through non-consensual masturbation.

Then we get to some really disturbing ones.

The progressive stack.

James, tell us about the progressive stack.

Yeah, the progressive stack is a pretty horrifying piece of work.

In fact, it's evil.

Fortunately, it did not get accepted.

The journal was inviting us to resubmit it and

give it another go.

It says this is a solid...

It says it's a solid essay that with revision will make a strong contribution to the growing literature of addressing injustice in the classroom.

Yeah, and so what it argues for is that we take students in college classrooms and we have them go through some kind of a inventory that determines how privileged they are.

It recommends a thing called the step forward, step back game as a possibility.

Once they're determined how privileged they are, the students are ranked according to their privilege.

then the more privileged you are, the worse you get treated in class.

So the most privileged white and male students are invited to listen and learn throughout the semester, which means they aren't allowed to speak or ask questions in class.

They're invited to sit in the floor in chains to experience reparations and level the knowing field to de and reprivilege the classroom learning environment.

The problem that the reviewers seemed to have with this set of suggestions was that we thought there's no way this will get in.

We have to temper it by saying we have to be compassionate to these students as we put them in the floor in chains.

And they said, watch it with a compassion that recenters the needs of the privileged over the oppressed.

And there's this idea out there called the pedagogy of discomfort, which means that you learn to overcome your privilege by being made uncomfortable and left to sit in that without being comforted.

And so they actually wanted to make a terrible, scary idea properly evil.

And that's the worst part is it's only a small step from what already exists in a great deal of the feminist and race-based education literature.

So this was not really terrifying.

This was not accepted because it wasn't bad enough?

At first, yeah.

And then later they were a bit concerned with the depth of the scholarship and the kind of routine things that you would expect out of

a scholarly paper.

They claimed, for example, that we drew on too many concepts and it would be confusing for the reader and to try to narrow it down to something a bit tighter and so on.

But

the idea that giving students experiential reparations and asking them not to be able to speak in class or to be spoken over and interrupted to teach them what that feels like, none of that was questioned.

So, what if this were published and it were real, if this were published, what would that mean to the university university system?

What does that mean?

So all these answers are really complicated.

There would be people who try to take this up.

In fact, we got the idea from a news article about somebody at University of Pennsylvania who was employing a similar but less extreme version of this in her classroom and got in trouble for it late last year.

So this idea didn't come to us out of the vacuum.

This was actually something that people are attempting in classrooms.

And so there would have been some

educators, primarily working in social justice side,

field topics, courses, I guess is the best way to say that, but also probably into some of the general ed stuff, who would take up some degree of these suggestions as, you know, experimental, but legitimate to use in the classroom.

And this was being submitted to the gold standard journal.

This wasn't some fringe journal in education.

This was the gold standard feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia, that we were working with here.

Which is where a lot of the literature that's like this already exists.

Which, if you don't mind me going on a little bit, this is kind of what's happening.

We think that what's happening here is kind of the equivalent with ideas of money laundering, called idea laundering.

So

they take these bad ideas, some of which are just opinion, some of them are prejudice, some of them are genuinely terrifying, like this educational thing.

And then they launder them through the academic process and they come out with the stamp of academic approval that makes them look like they're real knowledge.

So you'll hear people say, oh, well, there was a study, or we've based this program on studies that show, well, that's fine when the studies are good.

But when the studies are coming from a place that can't tell

truth from prejudice and opinion, it becomes a real problem.

James, one of the other ones I found disturbing disturbing was the

HOH2 and HOH1.

And HOH2

was accepted.

Can you

explain this one?

Yeah, that paper was accepted by Hypatia, the same journal I was just mentioning.

HOH stood for hoax on hoaxes.

So it was a hoax paper we wrote that was about writing academic hoaxes.

It's just a code name we gave for convenience.

What it argues is that you can only properly criticize things that go against social justice.

And in particular, you can only use humor to make fun of or

use satire to deflate that which goes against social justice.

If you use humor against social justice, if you criticize social justice, what that means is you never really properly engaged with it.

Therefore, we don't have to consider your criticism.

And that's one of the huge problems going on in this

set of

fields is that they don't accept criticism.

If you try to criticize them, they say that it's privilege-preserving epistemic pushback.

That's a scholar named Allison Bailey, who's huge in the education literature.

They say it's white fragility.

That's Robin DeAngelo, who has just had a big book published on that this year, but introduced a concept in 2011, which says that if

somebody with privilege, in particular white people for her work,

is challenged so that their privilege is put into question, that they are fragile and don't know how to deal with it because their privilege made them weak.

They don't know how how to psychologically deal with having that challenged, and they act out in anger or grief or something like that in trying to maintain their privilege.

And so

these ideas are already getting out there.

We've just took them a step further.

It's interesting, guys, because the one about hoaxes is interesting in that if to criticize what you guys did, they would almost have to cite your paper as.

That was the idea, yeah.

It was definitely to put them in that position.

And I've asked Paisha to stand by the paper that they accepted and published in our right names.

They haven't responded yet, but we'll see what they do.

Um, that way, indeed, people who want to criticize our project from a position of intersectional feminism will need to cite us in order to criticize us.

Unbelievable.

Can we get one more, Glenn,

you talked about this on the scary front?

The feminist Mein Kampf.

Well, you also did the white man Mein Kampf.

You did two.

One, the feminist feminist was accepted and the white man wasn't, right?

Correct.

Okay, tell me.

Correct.

Tell me about them.

So I'll do the the white one first because it didn't get in.

It was much more frightening.

It was written from the position of an autoethnography where the researcher is reflecting on, in this case, her own experience as a white lesbian woman coming to hate her own whiteness.

And it was rejected.

partly because the scholarship wasn't quite there, which is the case in all of the papers, but also because it positioned the author as a good white rather than being sufficiently supplicant or whatever to critical race theories.

So

there was an explicitly political reasoning behind why it was rejected, and it was that the author, as a white woman, was trying to make herself look good by criticizing her own whiteness, was one of the main reasons.

The feminist one was.

Well, hold on just a second.

Hold on just a second.

And that took

the parts of Mein Kampf where he was talking about Jews and replaced the words Jews with

whites.

Yeah, in that case, it was either whites or whiteness.

And then we edited the text around it and added a whole bunch of literature and reworded things so it would get past plagiarism checks and things like that.

So yeah, that was a that started with scanning through Mein Kampf.

picking out passages about the Jews and replacing Jews with whites or whiteness and then editing around it.

The feminist one didn't do it quite the same way.

The feminist one was not about, it didn't take Jews out and replace it with men, for example.

It actually is the chapter in Mein Kampf where Hitler explains the need for the Nazi Party as chapter 12 and what its members would be expected to hold to, including especially the sacrifices that they have to make to be Nazis.

And we replaced our movement, the party, etc.

He doesn't mention Nazis specifically in that chapter.

We replaced that with intersectional feminism or solidarity or allyship, something to do with the feminist movement, and criticized the idea that

some feminists do what they call choice feminism, which is the idea that if a woman is living her own life the way she wants to and considers that to be a statement of feminism, then she is doing feminism.

It's feminist for women to have full agency and make their own choices in the world.

That's what this paper was criticizing, saying that, no, no, their responsibility, if they really want to consider themselves feminists, is to be to make sacrifices and stand in solidarity with other oppressed people, particularly of women of color or women of other marginalized statuses.

Jabes, a couple of quick questions.

A.

This had to be one of those things that you entered into and hoped that you were wrong.

And when they were accepted, you had to celebrate and then a short time later going, good God, this is bad.

Am I right?

That is exactly right.

So especially with the Mein Kampf paper, I think, the one that got accepted,

the idea there was that we were trying to, it's very different from Mein Kampf, of course.

Don't let me mislead you that it's a one-to-one thing.

But

the politics of grievance come through, and I really am glad I get to talk to you about this, if I can, because politics of grievance is everywhere.

and it's certainly being used in the academic left as we were trying to demonstrate.

We called this stuff grievance studies, but we see it everywhere, right?

And I think this is why we're so divided politically right now.

I was really happy to talk to you because, I mean, I don't want to get anything touchy with you, but you're a real dude and that's why I wanted to talk to you.

Thanks.

You know, you had this whole Maya cola about

how things were going for you under Obama's time.

And I thought that was huge.

And I was like, you know, this guy, Glenn Beck, is a bridge.

He's looking for reconciliation.

It's on your Twitter bio.

We need to be talking to each other again.

So our project was, you know, we're people on the left.

We're left liberals.

I'm not ashamed to say that.

I know you consider yourself a classical liberal and you're conservative on the right.

That's great.

We on the left need to take responsibility for our own lunatics.

And so our project was kind of that.

You know, we're left-wing people who want the left to come back from the edge.

And we hope that, you know, the same thing's happening on the right and we can all start.

I think, you know, people in general, I get a lot of sense of this.

People send me emails about this now all the time, especially.

We're all kind of sick of all this nonsense, all the fighting, all the polarization, and we can't get anything done.

I think we want to get back to productive politics.

And as long as we're relying heavily on this grievance stuff, which clearly the academic left is, I think we see a lot of it coming out of the right-wing media sphere as well, from my perspective.

I think as long as we're focusing on that, we can't have productive conversations.

We can't remember, you know, you're an American, I'm an American, you're a person, I'm a person.

We have most of

the things that we think in common, even though we have some probably pretty serious political differences.

But I think we also have in common that we want to have better conversations.

We want to move society in a direction that benefits us all.

And it's just a matter of working out the details.

And I really hope that, you know,

that our project kind of reaches that point.

Does that make sense?

It totally does.

I am, I hate to say this to you, I'm out of time.

Could I invite you to come down and

do a podcast with me?

You know, we could spend an hour and a half uninterrupted

and just start where we've just left off.

Yeah, I would love that.

It would be great.

Great.

This is the best of the Glen Beck program.

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There is a fascinating story about Michael Bouble.

If you're a long-time listener of this program, you know that Michael Bouble is

a friend of the program and somebody that I have known, I think, since before he was really, really famous.

This comes from the dailymail.co.uk.

I'm not sure that Michael wasn't joking in part of this.

Just give you the highlights.

Michael Boublet is officially retired from music

following his son Noah's cancer battle.

The singer, 43, explained that the heartache he endured following his son's cancer diagnosis

at just three years old has changed his perception of life, and he is done now with fame.

With a new album out

titled Love on the Way, he explained that this is time for him to step away from music, wanting to leave it at the very top after making the perfect record.

Michael revealed his decision to quit the industry in what he claimed to be his last interview.

My whole being has changed since my son got cancer, he said.

Michael Bouble says he was embarrassed to realize how egotistical he had become as he nursed his boy Noah back to health.

But now he's got his mojo back.

The Canadian singer has won four Grammy, sold 75 million records, earning him $35 million a year.

He has been married to a stunning Argentinian model and actress for seven years.

The couple lived a life of luxury with their three children, Noah 5, Elias 2, and daughter Vidya Amber Betty, who is 11 weeks old.

Yet all of this seemed meaningless when Noah was diagnosed with liver cancer two years ago.

And the devastated couple immediately announced that they were putting their careers on hold for the care of their son.

Noah has been declared now cancer-free.

Michael Bouble is very emotional, his brown eyes well up at the mere mention of the C-word.

Cancer.

There's too many C-words now.

And it is clear he is living in the shadow of what he describes as two years of hell.

You just want to die, he said.

I don't even know how I was breathing.

My wife was the same, and even though I was the stronger of the two of us, I wasn't strong.

My wife was.

I'm sorry, I can't make it to the end of the sentence.

Let's just say we find out who we are with these things.

Going through this with Noah,

I didn't question who I was.

I just questioned everything else.

Why are we here?

Is this all there is?

Because if this is all there is, there has to be something bigger.

He says that one way he got through was to pretend he was in

Roberto

Benini's character from Life is Beautiful.

I don't know if that was a choice, he said, but that's who I became.

For instance, I never called it the hospital.

I called it the fun hotel.

He said, every day I got extra bed sheets and I would build a tent for Noah.

I just made the best of it.

It's such a difficult exercise.

It hurts me, and it hurts to talk about Noah, because it's not my story to tell.

It's his.

But my whole life has changed.

My perception of life.

I don't even know if I could get through this conversation without crying, and I never lost control of my emotions before in public.

I actually thought I'd never come back to the music business.

I never fell out of love with music.

I just needed to put it aside.

What was hard was going to the store and buying hot dogs and toilet paper and going to the gas station, going for a walk by the sea to clear my head.

Everyone recognizes me and says, How's your son?

You think you're close to getting over it, and you're sucked right back into it, but at the same time, I was given back my faith in humanity.

He said the illness made him realize he needed to make a change in his life.

I've spent

time, a good deal of time with people who aren't so lucky.

When this terrible news came, I realized I wasn't really having fun in the music business.

I had lost the joy, and at some point just before the Brits, I was starting to lose the plot.

I'd become desperate to hold on to something I thought I might be losing, and I thought I had to do something special to keep it.

I started doing things out of my comfort zone, like presenting.

And the truth is, it had been a while since I had been having fun.

I started to worry about ticket sales for my tours, what the critics said, what the perception of me might be.

I felt like I was living with this over my face and near and the reality I was seeing was all blurred by it.

I decided I never wanted to read my name in print again, never read a review, and I never have.

I decided I'd never use social media again, and I never have.

But the diagnosis made me realize how stupid I had been to worry about all of these unimportant things.

I was embarrassed by my ego.

I was embarrassed that it allowed this insecurity.

I realized that for many years, I couldn't believe I was on the same stage as my heroes.

I couldn't believe I was looking across somebody like Paul McCartney and saying things like, It's hard to get here, but my God, it's harder to stay here.

Then I woke up and thought, after ten years of trying to get here and five years of being scared that it would go away, I think I can enjoy it.

After his son's illness he says, I just don't have the stomach for it anymore.

The celebrity narcissism.

It started to I started to crumble, but then I started to wonder why I wanted to do it in the first place.

I had forgotten that it was all about souls connecting because I'd become so anxious.

There were people in my business life saying, if you hadn't done this or that, if you'd written a better song, tickets might be selling quicker.

I started to take all of that on board, and no one wanted to take any responsibility.

It's just so much easier for people to pass the buck to me because I was insecure enough already.

I would digest it and say, It's my fault, I'm rubbish.

It affected me, and I started to think, It's all gonna go, I'm gonna lose everything.

It is

fascinating to read these things from him.

Because what I've always felt about Michael Bouble

was

he was just having fun,

he was just living living a dream.

And I wondered, and I never spotted it in him.

I just wondered

if it was ever going to get old to him.

Because what makes him, I think, the best performer I've ever seen on stage is that joy.

He just has a joy of performance.

And

it is so infectious.

Yeah, he loves it.

I mean, you can tell when you see him live, you can tell he just absolutely loves doing it, or at least did at one point.

But they're starting to talk about, I mean, there's conflicting reports that he's actually thinking about stopping it completely.

He says, I was learning with passion that I was afraid I'd become a mere poor photocopy of my heroes.

But when I come back from this terrible time, I realized I'm not a mere photocopy.

I've learned everything I can from them, taken it, found my own soul, my own voice, my own style, and now no critic can take that away.

It needed clarifying.

Now I'm just singing the music I love.

Maybe when you let go, that's when it comes back to you.

It's a lot like love.

He is,

he, he, I think he's joking about,

because he says, I miss the guys in my band.

So when my wife had to go back to Argentina, I said to the guys, come on over to the house.

Let's have a drink, order some pizza, play some video games, and jam.

They came over and we partied and I said, let's play some music.

And I thought, wow, this is fun.

It was then that I realized I missed making music.

I didn't even know I missed it.

That was about a year ago.

So why would he possibly be saying that he is now?

It seems like it might be one of those situations where the internet has taken a somewhat sarcastic comment and turned it into reality.

His spokespeople are coming out today and saying that he's not actually going to retire because he's in the middle of a tour and a book,

album release, and all that other stuff.

So

here's what he says exactly to the reporter.

He pauses.

There are three reasons I wanted to do this album.

One, because I felt a debt of gratitude deeper than I can explain to the millions of people all over the world who prayed for us and showed us compassion.

That gave me faith in humanity.

Two, because I love music and I feel I can continue the legacy of my idols.

And three, because if the world was ending, not just my own personal hell, but watching the political turmoil in America and watching Europe break up, there's never a better time for music.

Then he suddenly stops.

Quote, this is my last interview, he says quite solemnly.

I'm retiring from the business.

I've made the perfect record, and now I can leave at the very top, end quote.

Somehow, though, the writer says, I don't think he really means it.

That's unbelievable because, you know, it was put all over the media as if he was retiring.

Well, he said it was his last interview.

He's got other interviews scheduled.

Like, he's had a whole press tour for this this album.

It's just silly.

And the most important thing, though, is looking at that and saying,

that is really the type of thing that changes your perspective completely, right?

You go through something like that, and you stop and you examine all the nonsensical idiocy that you participate in every day.

And you can reprioritize.

You don't want to have to go through that to do it, but sometimes it's the only thing that makes you kind of reprioritize the things you're doing in your life.

And he seems to have-I mean, he is making $35 million a year if he's out there touring and stuff.

And he's able to walk away from that

because he just wants to spend time with his son.

How many times do we hear those excuses?

It's according to spend more time with my family.

That was completely real with this guy.

It's nice to see somebody who actually, you know, can't.

And it's nice to see that he got through it and has made it into a good thing.

You know,

I have

probably more respect for Michael Bouble

than any other professional that I have ever met in the entertainment industry because he has found a way to keep his feet on the ground and he was unafraid.

I mean, when everybody,

when it was very popular to hate me, he didn't.

I mean, it's always popular to hate you.

I know, but he, but he was, and he was never taking a stand for me.

He just wouldn't,

he just didn't understand.

He's like, look, I'm not in politics.

I'm a Canadian.

Why do I care?

What did he get out of it?

Didn't he get a fight at a hockey game?

Yeah.

He said the guy turned around and said, I can't believe you like Glenn Beck.

And he's like, I'm Canadian.

I don't vote.

What does it matter?

What does it matter to you?

And the guy threw a punch, and he said, I threw punches back.

And he said,

I got into a hockey fight.

Got into a hockey fight.

I am so happy to hear that his family is

doing better, and his son has made this miraculous turn.

And

Michael Bouble,

you've given enough.

If you want to give more, we will certainly take it.

But

do what's right for you.

Do what's right for you and for your family.

And your real fans will be thrilled no matter what you decide.

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